Ccna routing and Switching Complete Study Guide

Load balancing    MLP provides bandwidth on demand, utilizing load balancing on up to 

10 links and can even calculate the load on traffic between specific sites. You don’t actu-

ally need to make all links the same bandwidth, but doing so is recommended. Another 

key MLP advantage is that it splits packets and fragments across all links, which reduces 

latency across the WAN.

Increased redundancy    This one is pretty straightforward… If a link fails, the others will 

still transmit and receive.

Link fragmentation and interleaving    The fragmentation mechanism in MLP works by 

fragmenting large packets, then sending the packet fragments over the multiple point-to-

point links. Smaller real-time packets are not fragmented. So interleaving basically means 

real-time packets can be sent in between sending the fragmented, non-real-time packets, 

which helps reduce delay on the lines. So let’s configure MLP now to get a good feel for 

how it actually works now.

Configuring MLP

We’re going to use Figure 21.18 to demonstrate how to configure MLP between two routers.

f i g u r e   21.18     MLP between Corp and SF routers

Corp

SF